Asia must act fast to lessen climate change - report

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - Asia, home to nearly two-thirds of the world's people, must take urgent action to lessen the effects of climate change but needs considerable help from rich nations elsewhere, a report said on Monday.

"Up in Smoke? Asia and the Pacific," the last in a series of reports from the New Economics Foundation (NEF) think-tank, appears just after leading scientists said the effects of global warming would be all-pervasive and irreversible.

"Wealthy industrialised countries must act first and fastest to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but emerging Asian countries also need to contribute to climate change mitigation," it said.

The report called for sustainable development policies including ending deforestation and promoting energy efficiency and environmentally sensible renewable energy sources, and said booming palm oil production posed a problem in this regard.

More than half Asia's four billion people live near the coast, making them highly vulnerable to rising sea levels from melting glaciers, and all are open to the vagaries of the water cycle affecting food production, it said.

"It has become clear that Asia will see some major changes as a result of climate change, and several of these are becoming evident already," Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) head Rajendra Pachauri wrote in the report.

"Even more compelling are the projections of future climate change and associated impacts in Asia," he added.

The IPCC, which won the Nobel Peace Prize this year along with former US vice president Al Gore, issued the leading scientists' warning that climate change was irreversible.